100 days, 100 blogs: Lucky Rentals' crowdsourced marketing push

Marketing for $5 a day? It can be done – if you're willing to crowdsource.

Marketing for $5 a day? It's not impossible – if you're willing to crowdsource.

Kiwi campervan rental company Lucky Rentals has turned over its marketing to the public for 100 days, soliciting photos, videos, blog posts and other promotional material from fiverr.com, an online market where sellers offer their services for $5.

Chief executive Nathan Brand said traffic to the company website had grown by more than 50 percent as a result.

“As a young company we need to be smart with how we spend our
marketing money," he said.

“So we created
the Lucky Fiverr project: 100 days of fiverr.com gigs delivering content that is 100 percent sourced from the Fiverr site using creative and talented producers.”

Lucky Rentals, which was formed a year ago and has offices in Christchurch and Auckland, is up to day 30 of the project and has been posting the crowdsourced content on its blog every day.

“We’ve had some hilarious, ridiculous and downright strange
results,” he said.

“From the Lucky Rentals rap by esalaah who has
had over four million views on YouTube to a half naked obese man (user
name Krazyretard) singing us happy birthday, each gig has been
completely unique and a lot of fun to see brought to life."

He said it was a creative opportunity to try something new, engage customers and grow sales.

While putting your marketing in the hands of the public could be
dangerous, Brand said getting people to do crazy things in the name of
Lucky Rentals was paying off.

Submissions were checked before being posted on the company blog.

"As long as [the content] is not offensive or defamatory or anything like that, then we're quite happy to put them up, whatever they are."

Brand said he had not had to reject any submissions yet, although he had received one disappointing entry that failed to live up to expectations.

He said the benefit of crowdsourcing marketing material was that the company could potentially repurpose it in the future.

"It gives us this great big slew of content that we own and can use going forward," he said.

Even if nobody else got a laugh out of it, he said, at least the Lucky Rentals crew did.

He said businesses always ran into the same issue when planning a marketing strategy – wanting to do something quirky and fun that usually exceeded the budget. But it was hard to go wrong with $5 per day.

He said Lucky Rentals had previously set up a Facebook page and Google Adwords, but wanted to do something that wasn't "just another cleverly designed banner".

While companies frequently used Fiverr to solicit designs for logos, Brand said he hadn't come across any other businesses using Fiverr in the way Lucky Rentals was.

"100 days of blogging is something out of the box," he said. “The Fiverr community exhibits the same kind of 'out of the box'
marketing as Lucky Rentals – and that’s what we like.”